The intense Catholicism
of Ireland may be difficult for Protestants to applaud; yet most
certainly those who fail to take it into account are hopelessly
handicapped in the attempt to deal with Irish problems. The Irish
are born fighters. One of the most splendid passages which even
Irish oratory ever produced was that in which Sheill protested
against the insolence of stigmatizing the countrymen of Wellington
as "aliens" from England, and no policy could be more suicidal than
that which deflects the soldiership of Ireland from the British
cause.
Charles James Fox shares with Edmund Burke the praise of having
brought the ideas which we call Liberal to bear on Irish government,
and his words are at least as true to-day as when they were written:
"We ought not to presume to legislate for a nation in whose feelings
and affections, wants and interests, opinions and prejudices, we have
no sympathy." Are "The Incompatibles" to be always incompatible, or
can we now, even at the eleventh hour, make some effort to understand
the working of the Irish temperament?
The incompatibility, as Matthew Arnold read it, is not between
the two nations which Providence has so closely knit together,
but between insolence, dulness, rigidity, on the one hand, and
sensibility, quickness, flexibility, on the other.
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